Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/63

52 furnaces; brakemen, switchmen, engineers, laborers among the heaps of scrap iron and limestone threw him a curious glance as he went by. Each shed had its own fierce noise, a rumble, a thud, a clang, or a shriek, repeated and repeated and repeated, here rapidly, here at measured and deliberate intervals. The mingling of sound and the increasing maze of tracks bewildered Floyd, and he kept looking behind him with a sense that he might at any moment be borne down by some ungovernable mass.

Two blast furnaces towered before him, connected with each other by half a dozen high red stacks, in which the blast was heated and reheated. Between them and the river were the heaps of ore and limestone and coke, which the indefatigable little climbing cars fed into the furnace. A steamboat and two barges were moored at the bank, discharging a cargo of coke; a crane lifted up a great scoop that had been filled, and two of the laborers on the barges, released for a moment from toil, fell to at good-natured fisticuffs. Floyd stopped to watch them; they ducked and dodged about on the loose footing of coke; one got the other's head under his arm and began knuckling it. But by that time the crane had dumped its scoop-load, and with inflexible insistence had swung back demanding more; the laborers stumbled again to their task, and Floyd moved on to Open-Hearth Mill Number Two, where his apprenticeship was to begin.

This was a long shed with a row of twelve yellow fire- brick ovens along each side and a chaotic space between—containing excavations, cranes, sunken iron bowls, sand heaps, and narrow-gauge tracks. Floyd walked down the broad steel-plate pavement in front of one row of furnaces. Each had its iron door with round open eyehole, through which glared a light so blinding that the man looking in to examine the condition of the "heat" had to wear black glasses. Now and then he would catch up a long-handled spoon, draw out a little of the "heat," and spill it on the pavement, testing it. This man was the melter; and he